


Cut-Time Rhythm

by angularmomentum



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Bodyswap, Curses, Injury, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-08-01 04:10:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16277534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angularmomentum/pseuds/angularmomentum
Summary: Nicke's side of the bed was empty.It was the wrong side of the bed.





	Cut-Time Rhythm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ferritin4](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferritin4/gifts).



> Dear Ferritin4, I've never done a bodyswap before, so this was a nice chance to give it a shot. I hope you've enjoyed the exchange!

Sasha had never really _understood_ Kate Bush until now.

That was the first inkling something might be off.

That and the lack of morning-after soreness he always enjoyed waking up with, the tactile, physical reminder of another body with his body, Nicke’s little teeth and torturous fingers and the pervasive ache of want.

Nicke was usually up first in the morning, but he did also usually say hello with his mouth instead of the stereo.

-

Sasha had a high tolerance for things he considered foibles rather than annoyances, like the way Nicke didn’t sort anything by colour because all his clothes were black and grey or some eye-watering salmon golf abomination. His taste in music was just something they sometimes had to negotiate over in the car when they drove together, and Nicke was much more likely to declare he didn’t care for Sasha’s playlists than Sasha was to object to his.

Living around someone did that, produced tolerance, a resistance band of unseen compromises. Listening to Nicke sing in the shower when he thought nobody was listening made up the difference. Getting to see him at his most disarrayed, listening to the bizarre noises he made at night when he was fast asleep, the clipped, gentle tone in his voice when he called his brother.

It was the little things which had grown to be something special. It was the bigger ones which had started to be a problem.

-

Kate Bush was on the stereo in the kitchen, filtering up through the floor.

The weird melody felt less jarring than it usually did.

Nicke's side of the bed was empty.

It was the wrong side of the bed.

Sasha blew his hair out of his face, trying to wake up. God, the slowness of his hands, why was— his hair had fallen back, blonde and tangled, long enough to twist into curls.

Sasha touched the tip of his nose, investigating its frightening straightness.

Ah.

That was, on the balance of things, very unexpected.

-

His body was sitting at his kitchen table, glaring at a cup of coffee. The smell did something strange, provoking some kind of physical longing Sasha was unfamiliar with.

“Are you drinking it?” It came out bizarrely, his own accent around the unfamiliar timbre of Nicke's voice.

“It's horrible,” Nicke said, arch of his vowels jarring through Sasha’s mouth. Nicke pushed it towards him. “I had no idea you hated coffee this much.”

Kate Bush was singing about hounds. Sasha was appreciating the cadence of the drums in his chest. “I don't hate it. Just don't drink it so much.”

“Try it.”

Sasha took a sip. It burst over his tongue like some blissful new drug, calming the vague headache pinching at the base of his skull. “Fuck me. This is how it taste to you?”

It was so strange to see his own face. He had never seen his own asymmetry from this angle before, the reverse image from the mirror, one of Nicke's closed-mouth not-smiles pulling at his lips. “We fucked up,” Nicke said. “We fucked up _bad._ ”

-

Sasha had always been careful what he wished for.

That was the always-thing about wishes, the peculiarity of something desperately wanted coming with the unwanted consequence on its reverse side. Sasha knew what he was getting in to when he set himself on the NHL and plunged towards it with every shred of will in his body. His body was always big. There was a lot of will.

He’d never managed to get a word out of Nicke about what he wished for, because Nicke always said he had it already.

By the time he really started to know him that was almost true.

-

Sasha couldn’t stop looking at himself. Everything about him was subtly different to how he’d pictured it, the universal collage of his face stitched together from film and pictures and his morning view in the bathroom mirror proved wrong in an instant.

There was nothing stranger in the world, he decided, than realizing you didn’t look how you thought you looked. Then he revised his position immediately as Nicke's hair fell forward again, brushing the side of his cheek. Irritated, he pushed it back. Being in Nicke’s body in a slightly less than biblical sense was far, far weirder.

Nicke watched him, silent and curious, before he kicked him under the table. “Put it behind your ears.”

Sasha just stared at him. “When I say I want to know how you’re feeling, this is not how I imagine.”

“I can’t believe you don’t like Kate Bush,” Nicke said. “Your ears don’t work right.”

“Ears are fine. Just sounds too—”

“Don’t say weird.”

“—weird.”

Nicke glared at him and tapped the button on his phone. “My print ID doesn’t work any more. I have to type the number. Like a caveman.”

“People gonna notice,” Sasha said, trying to stop smiling. God, he was a monster. “Gonna ask why you have such a good, strong Russian accent now.”

“You’ve been learning Swedish in the off season?” Nicke was still tapping at the phone, a deliberate kind of stabbing motion with one of Sasha’s much larger index fingers, a delicate frown pulling his eyebrows the rest of the way together. “If I knew how big your fingers are I never ask you to put them in me.”

Sasha offered Nicke his own hands back, palms up, marvelling at the fragility of them, the way they tapered off to small, rounded ends. They looked different from this angle, smooth and barely scarred. “You’re a liar,” Sasha offered. “You tell me to do it faster.”

Nicke let out a shaky breath and grabbed one.

At least that still felt the same.

-

When they met, Sasha made a wish.

Whether it came true is between him and the ice he made it on.

-

There was always a temptation right at the beginning of the offseason — always too long, always too painful — to stay in bed for a few days at a time, just let the world pass by outside the windows.

They never did, but Sasha always wanted to.

This year Nicke took off right away to play at Worlds and left Sasha behind to ice his blackened knee, and the worst part of it was Sasha’s own relief, the cold, creeping feeling through his chest that came when he didn’t have to keep working to make himself understood, that he didn’t need to keep a lid on his grief for the sake of a national team. Or for the sake of someone feeling the same thing, to give each other room to breathe.

Tenth years had power, somehow. It felt like it, when Sasha thought of how long they’d been doing exactly this, rolling over and over in the definition of madness: doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

-

Nicke came back with a win.

Sasha hoped it had eased something in him, but having him back still felt as though it was a repetitive motion, beginning to strain.

-

On this particular August morning, Sasha couldn’t get over the peculiar, pinching grind deep in his left hip, some kind of maddening phantom ache that didn’t _hurt_ exactly but felt as though every so often someone was poking him just so.

Nicke was walking a circle around the kitchen table, movements a strange amalgamation of Sasha’s body and Nicke’s reticence, his centre of gravity shifted upwards by several centimetres. Sasha was watching him, trying to think of something to say which would alleviate the fixed, furious expression on his face as he deliberately placed one foot in front of the other and held up his protein smoothie as a counterbalance.

“Look like a wet cat, Nicke,” Sasha observed. “Why you never tell me your hip still hurts?”

“It doesn’t,” Nicke snarled, bouncing on his toes. “Maybe a little, sometimes. Why don’t you tell me when I hurt you?”

Sasha blushed, or rather, Nicke’s body did, his mortification tripping some bundle of nerves which sent a flush rocketing up his neck and over his cheeks, heat of it genuinely alarming. “Maybe I like it, sometimes.”

“In the morning, too?”

God, if Nicke’s body got any hotter Sasha was going to have to be held accountable for damages. “You always so hot when you get nervous?”

Nicke stopped walking, standing by the chair Sasha hadn’t managed to move himself out of. He laid the back of his hand against Sasha’s borrowed cheek, Sasha’s whole face showing every shred of his amusement. “Is this how I look when you do this to me?”

Sasha couldn’t honestly say. “All your blood go to the face, get all pink?”

Nicke bit his lip, Sasha’s gapped teeth seeming even more noticeable from the outside. “Yeah.”

“Then, I guess so.”

“I look like a— strawberry,” Nicke observed, finding the word.

"You know what is Russian for strawberry? Klubnika." 

"Oh no."

"Klubnicke," Sasha said, starting to smile. “I call you that all the time now. Good thing you so hard to embarrass.”

“Am I?” Nicke asked, leaning down a bit, examining his own face. Sasha could see every thread of grey in his own hair, every slowly-deepening line by his eyes. “You think that?”

“I think a lot of things,” Sasha said, nonsensically. “You think kissing still feel the same?”

“One way to find out.”

Nicke dropped the smoothie just the precise wrong way for it to bounce down onto the edge of the table and ricochet off, breaking the tentative kiss just as it started, both of them splattered with personal-trainer mandated goop.

-

Sasha took the opportunity while Nicke was hogging the shower to have a delayed existential crisis about having become a body snatcher overnight, panic floating through him like a toxic mist.

The sensation, he noted distantly, was different in Nicke’s body; Sasha’s was like a sharp pain, claws in his chest hooked under his ribs. Nicke’s was an ache, a pervasive, body-wide tension that felt as though his jaw might never unlock.

He made it to the bathroom while the steam from Nicke turning the heat up to as hot as he could stand creating a cocoon of warmth, obscuring the mirror and beading every smooth surface with tiny droplets.

Sasha sat on the edge of the bath until he was done, breathing in the heat.

Nicke stepped out of the doors wearing Sasha’s body and nothing else.

Sasha could see the moment he spotted him, wiping a hand through the condensation on the glass above the sink and catching sight of him, starting so sharply he knocked the soap dish off the counter. “What’s the matter,” he asked, instead of doing anything so undignified as yelping.

Fuck, but Sasha loved him. “How you make your jaw come unstuck?”

Nicke stared at him, the fixed expression Sasha used to think meant he was offended, but actually just meant he was thinking about something too hard to move his face. It looked strange over Sasha’s features, familiar and uncanny all at once. “Sometimes I can’t,” he offered, finally. “Does this always get so hot in the shower?” He turned around, thumbing back Sasha’s foreskin to flick gently at the piercing on the underside.

“Cold, too,” Sasha confessed. He didn’t venture to say whether he liked the sensation. He thought Nicke could judge for himself. “You like it so far?”

Nicke made a familiar, considering face, his expression on Sasha’s features. It was as if the question hadn't entered his mind, but now that it had he was giving it his undivided attention.

Sasha couldn’t help it; the image of himself casually naked, knowing it _wasn't_ him, that Nicke hadn’t gone for a towel out of reflex, or hadn’t had time and had forgotten, was so unsettling as to be fascinating.

“It’s not how I thought,” Nicke said, breaking Sasha out of the weird spiral that was almost arousal, an unfamiliar coil of tension growing tighter in his stomach. “Should we test it?”

-

“You really get off on yourself?” Nicke asked, crowding Sasha against the bathroom sink, getting a solid handful of his own hair. God, Sasha would grow his this long if it wasn’t so annoying, just for the jolt of pleasure.

The counter was sharp against his hips, the weight of his body against his back.

The steam hadn’t fully cleared, leaving enough of a film over the mirror for Sasha to take a minute to really notice that he was looking out of Nicke’s eyes, and the shock of it —Nicke’s mouth open and wet, Sasha’s own face above— was enough to send him over the edge, barely aware enough to marvel at ow everything Nicke felt seemed to start in his chest, blooming warmth or sharp terror, all from the same place.

-

Sasha woke up on the bathroom floor with Nicke beneath him.

At least he thought it was him. It was his body, so presumably Sasha was back in his own.

Nicke groaned and rolled over, jabbing him unerringly in the ribs. “What the _fuck_?”

Definitely Nicke.

-

Sasha remembered meeting Nicke. Of course he did.

For a while it had become a fixation, the way he’d moved when Sasha had awkwardly given him his first jersey, the way he’d crammed that hat on over his beaming face, the way neither of them really understood each other, but they both understood hockey. Both believed in it.

Then a year later Nicke had arrived and Sasha had actually gotten to know him, and their meeting, however dramatic, didn’t seem quite so monolithically important anymore.

After all, it was hard to sustain a story where Nicke had been chosen for him when Sasha was holding his hair back out of the way while Nicke was saying goodbye to last night’s drinks in the toilet, or when Nicke got so frustrated with a losing streak that Sasha—offhanded, young, edged all over with hope— suggested if he wanted to blow off some steam Sasha was willing. That was about when it started to feel mutual. Like Sasha knew him better, knew his body inside and out.

He didn’t, because nobody ever gets to know that, but it had felt like it.

And then, slowly, it didn’t anymore.

It wasn’t one thing, but Sasha did wonder, in a soft, furious corner of his mind, whether they really were cursed somehow. Whether he’d ever see if those little white lines starting to carve in beside Nicke’s mouth would disappear if they figured out what was stopping them in the second round.

It was like faulty clockwork, grinding to a halt at two minutes to the hour and sticking there, vibrating on the stuck gear.

-

Nicke made breakfast mechanically, as though he didn’t quite trust what his body —recently returned to his possession only a little bit worse for wear, Sasha thought— would do at higher speeds.

Everything came out bland, but since Sasha was interested in grilling and little else, he wasn't going to complain.

It was a little bit ridiculous that Nicke had never met a pepper grinder he wouldn’t grimace distrustfully at, but then, the fact that he was ridiculous was something Sasha had had ample opportunity to think about over the last ten years.

Everybody worth knowing was ridiculous, somehow.

Sasha watched Nicke sit on the back porch wearing a long-sleeved shirt in late August because it was obviously the first one he’d pulled off his shelf and suspiciously eat eggs he’d cooked himself and decided all over again that he loved him. “I’m gonna put some Tabasco on this,” Sasha said anyway, before Nicke called him an idiot and pointed at the side table, where he’d already brought it out.

“We should talk,” Sasha said, after he’d made good on his statement.

“Did you get your answer?”

“Not really.”

“Me either.” Nicke sighed, setting his rapidly-emptied plate aside. “I get the piercing, now, though.”

“You cock look bigger from outside,” Sasha informed him. “You can’t tell, but I promise, it is.”

Nicke looked at him incredulously for a whole second before he choked out his weird laugh, eyes creasing shut when he couldn’t stop.

“Think we get our money back?” Sasha asked, throwing his bare feet into Nicke’s lap, poking him with his toes for emphasis.

“I think chasing ten dollars you sent through the mail as a joke is gonna get nowhere.”

“It worked, though.”

“Did it?” Nicke asked carefully, resting a hand on Sasha’s bare ankle.

Sasha dreaded moments in which he didn’t have a good answer for something. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t stand to be wrong. He didn’t love it, but if there was anyone on the planet who did he’d like to meet them. It was different, simply not _knowing._

-

 _Get To Know Your Partner Better!_ screamed the ad, _Achieve Instant Synergy!_

Sure, it was email spam, but how much bank account information could anyone get from a ten dollar bill and two strands of hair sent to a mailing address in Nebraska?

Anyway, it seemed like whatever bizarre magic they’d bought one night when they were both vodka drunk and stupid had worn off.

The only ill-effect was that Sasha wasn’t sure what it had proved, aside from the creeping weirdness of the world being less than a figment of his imagination recently, and that living in Nicke’s flesh for a few hours hadn’t told him anything but that Nicke’s anxiety gave him lockjaw and he had the pain tolerance of a professional athlete.

So did Sasha. It wasn’t news.

-

Sasha never found it difficult to leave the house, even though his presence was invariably noticed around DC more than Nicke’s.

He’d never been sure how he did it, a deliberate fade to the background so that Sasha was always the star of the show.

Maybe that was his magic power. Sasha still thought anything like that was probably bunk, but much like he existence of God or the certainty of the afterlife, Sasha wasn’t willing to discount it entirely.

He left that to Nicke, his favourite atheist, the only person whose skepticism regarding the perpetuity of the soul he’d ever enjoyed exposing his partial belief to.

Nicke made fun of him for plenty of things, but never that.

After breakfast they went to work. It was an astoundingly normal morning, all things considered.

Sasha caught Nicke sucking in a deep breath just before they went into the underground parking, looking up at the practice rink with resignation all over his face. Everything Nicke felt was always on his face, if you knew where to look.

Sasha was still tempted to demand a refund, watching Nicke's lips flatten down to a thin line as the car went down the ramp.

-

They were the first ones back of the regular team, not necessarily by choice or standing but because they lived nearby. Sasha got his fix of home at Midsummer when Nicke was off doing god-knew-what in Sweden with the rest of his family, but ten years of habit had formed around them and here they were, lacing up after a coach’s meeting.

Cutting the ribbon on a new season that already felt a lot like the last one, even though so many people were gone that it was just them and Beags left who’d actually been young together.

The fact that neither of them were actually _old_ felt semantic at best.

At least the ice still felt good.

Sasha loved to get his sea legs back.

-

They went out for dinner. It was another completely unspoken tradition Sasha had no interest in mentioning lest it change, but when they both started putting their game faces on for the season it always seemed worth it to go somewhere nice.

Sasha almost invariably wanted Japanese or Italian and as long as there was something bland on the menu Nicke would be happy, so Sasha filmed a hibachi chef trying to throw a shrimp at his face and Nicke snatching it out of the air with his hand lest it get anywhere near his mouth. He offered it to Sasha by the tail, grinning despite himself.

Sasha took it with his teeth, chewing happily while Nicke wiped any trace of seafood off his fingers before eating the pile of steak in front of him as though it was his sole mission in life.

There were people around. Sasha found it difficult to care, wanting suddenly to take him home.

-

Sasha would talk about it, if he had the right words for it, the way they’d settled around each other.

It never did take much to make Nicke flush, and it didn’t take much for Sasha to laugh at him, remembering the prickly warmth of it, the way he must feel overheated already.

Sasha never did get off on fighting, but he could get off on how Nicke could say something in just the right way that made him want to do it for him immediately; suck his cock, take him to bed like the adults they are, stifle the noise that wanted to come out him when Nicke’s tongue followed the press of his fingers, working him wet and open.

For something so loud, there really wasn’t any adequate way to describe it.

-

Sasha woke up with a headache.

Irritated, he pushed his hair back off his face.

Not his face. His face was staring at him, wide blue eyes and thick grey hair and stubble which was becoming a beard again.

“Son of a bitch,” Nicke rasped, Sasha’s lips forming around the words.

“Don’t talk about Mama like that,” Sasha managed, wondering how much coffee would make this throbbing in Nicke’s brain stem go away. “You still have my body and she hear you, she yell.”

Nicke covered his borrowed head with a pillow and groaned.

-

“You know,” Nicke said, stabbing a spoon angrily into the tub of protein powder they both hated, “I knew that letter was a bad idea.”

“Magic is not real!” Sasha felt compelled to point out, watching _his body_ walk around _without him_. “How we’re meant to know?”

“If magic isn’t real, how come we are cursed?” Nicke snapped, dropping the contraction the way he only did nowadays when he was very, very upset.

“We not cursed, Nicke.” It was one thing for Sasha to think it, and another to hear it out loud from the one person who shouldn’t believe that.

Sadness in Nicke’s body still sat in his chest, heavy like a stone. Sasha’s was in his gut, his solar plexus, the very middle of him. He missed it.

“No?” Nicke dropped the spoon into the sink with a clang, loud in the silence. “Ten years of— anyone been here longer than us?”

“Then it’s me,” Sasha said. “I’m here longer than _us._ We don’t win before you, either.”

Nicke stared at him, wearing his face like a mask.

Was that how he looked when he was angry? Or was it just that he knew so intimately what anger looked like on Nicke that it was somehow incredibly frightening to see that exact minute expression on his own face?

“I’m going to Starbucks,” Sasha said, standing up carefully, still not too sure where to place his weight.

“Don’t speak Russian to anyone,” Nicke said quietly.

“What, you think anyone believe we switch bodies? Maybe you just learn some Russian.”

Nicke sighed, tension in his face falling apart all at once. “Sorry.”

Sasha felt like he ought to say something, but couldn’t form the right words. “I’ll bring you something,” he said instead.

-

Sasha had to adjust the seat a few times before he started to kick himself for taking his own car.

“Why are your arms so short?” Sasha grumbled at Nicke’s face in the rear view mirror.

Of course, that was just his body. Not Sasha’s.

-

Starbucks had a quality Sasha had never encountered in any other place. It was like an airport, almost, a miniature distilled version of the kind of space where everyone was going somewhere and the staff weren’t paid enough to give a fuck who you were.

Sasha had always liked it in the same way he’d enjoyed the very rare trips his mother had taken him on as a child to the great, glass-ceilinged shopping centre in Moscow he remembered mostly for its calming chaos. Everything was moving. None of it had anything to do it him.

He ordered a black coffee for the headache and two frothing sweet things for the rest and leaned up against the counter to wait.

Someone took a photo of him with a phone camera, as though he wouldn’t notice, breaking the spell of the place entirely. _Fuck_ Starbucks.

Sasha didn’t react, wondering how he’d manage a Swedish accent or Nicke’s particular, clipped-off phrasing if they approached him, but luckily, whatever his face was doing must have been enough to put them off.

It wasn’t until he was back in his car that he realised he’d worn his own clothes, a bright red shirt and some sweatpants, not bothering with underwear.

He carefully put the drinks in the cup holders before he put his head down on the steering wheel in exactly the right spot to set off the horn, blare of it sending every pigeon in the parking lot scuttling for cover.

He let it sound for long enough to satisfy the warring snakes which appeared to have manifested under his ribs.

He’d always loved it when Nicke wore his clothes.

-

“Why are there pictures of me without underwear on instagram?” Nicke asked him, taking the drink with the care he still hadn’t shaken of Sasha’s slightly greater size.

Sasha looked down at the sweatpants. “Autopilot.”

Nicke said nothing for several seconds before he stood up. He had dressed Sasha’s body in all black. The pants were too short on his legs.

Sasha burst out laughing, mirth like champagne bubbles popping all through him. Nicke only grumbled a little when he hugged him, pressing his nose into the side of Sasha’s borrowed neck. “Is this what I smell like?” he mumbled. “Oh no.”

“We’re not cursed,” Sasha insisted, carding a hand through his own hair. Huh. It was rougher at the back, silky and thick at the top, still smelling vaguely of sleep and sex. “Fuck. Everyone who say I have big head is right.”

-

“So,” Nicke said, that evening, after they’d both somehow muddled through their appointments, saying as little as humanly possible in Sasha’s case and smiling viciously at everyone in Nicke's. “I have a— theory.”

“What, it happen when we fuck?”

Nicke looked put out to be preempted. “Exactly.”

Sasha clapped a hand down on his thigh, unable not to admire the muscle tone, even though it was his. “We test it?”

-

Nicke was right.

That posed its own set of problems.

-

“We can just not have sex?” Sasha suggested, after another blackout-inducing climax landed him back in his own body.

Nicke stared at him with his toothbrush half out of his mouth, foam dripping down his chin. He paused in his brushing to spit, taking the time to rinse before he jabbed the crushed-up brush end at Sasha’s chest. “Or,” he said, “we can do twice. Once at night, once in the morning.”

“We’ll be so tired,” Sasha said, admiringly. “We not twenty anymore.”

“Hip flexibility exercises.” Nicke enunciated each word with a flat American twang, trying very hard to keep from smiling. “PT.” He finally rinsed his toothbrush. “What have we got to lose?”

Sasha bit his tongue, then decided not to. “We’re good,” he said quietly. “We gonna be good.”

Nicke eyed him strangely but didn’t say a word, kissing him on the corner of his mouth, minty and cool, before he disappeared into the bedroom.

-

The season started for real with both of them in their correct bodies.

That was about the best thing to be said about it.

Sasha was speaking too quickly to match the reporters and garbled it, but he stood by his statement. At least to him, they weren’t gonna (be) suck this year.

So many missing faces. So many kids, guys looking up at him and Nicke like they were lighthouses and every game was a storm at sea.

Thank god for Kuzy and Dima.

“Why does your scarier half look like someone stole his nutrition bricks?” Kuzy asked, after one particularly galling loss against the infants from Toronto. “Aren’t you putting out?”

“I regret telling you about my personal life,” Sasha informed him, stripping the last tape off socks. “Are you saying I’m not his better half?”

“It’s relative when you’re a demon.”

“Be nice,” Sasha tossed the ball of tape at him and tried to muster a smile. “We all feel like shit.”

Kuzy shrugged, ignoring the tape ball clinging to his under armour. “Just one game. Early in the season, you know? Everyone's learning. Even you.”

Dima leaned over him, already working on what looked like a terrible moustache. Sasha approved. “What’re we learning?”

“How to get over it,” Kuzy said, grinning widely enough to split his face, perhaps the better to disguise how true that was.

-

Nicke met him at home after getting a drink with the Nylander kid, even though of anyone Sasha knew, Nicke hated losing the most. That he’d put a good face on over his mood said a lot about how much he liked William and even more about how little he wanted anyone else to speak to him.

“He still have big crush on you?” Sasha asked him gently, running his fingers through Nicke’s hat-flattened curls when Nicke tipped sideways on the couch and landed mostly in his lap. His hair was still damp on the underside.

“Shut up.”

“He still look at you like you a rock star?”

Nicke took his hand and kissed his palm, lingering over the little graze under Sasha’s index finger he’d gotten somewhere and had barely noticed.

Sasha took it as a sign he should keep talking. “We gonna be great this year, I think.”

Nicke hummed, lacing his fingers in with Sasha’s and holding on. “Based on tonight?”

“You feel bad? So early?”

“Just tired.”

“Boyfriend make you tired?” Nicke didn’t rise to the tease. “Nicke?”

“I’m fine. We lost. I’ll get over it.”

Sasha was getting a little tired of people saying that to him. “I have good idea,” he started, picture forming as he spoke. “Maybe we switch, go to practice in the morning. No game, so is fine.”

Nicke sat up, pushing himself just far enough away to eye Sasha from a few inches distance, knee touching Sasha’s thigh, warm and solid. “Why?”

“You want to fuck with everyone a little?”

Sasha loved it when Nicke grinned.

-

Nicke had conditions of course. Sasha intended to abide by them, not least because as Nicke detailed them he was already braced above Sasha in a shaft of early morning sun, hard against his hip, a little spark back in his eyes at the prospect of something harmless yet terrifying to distract them.

No nudity (partial or complete) with cameras around. No messing with support staff, none of whom deserved to have a heart attack. No eating any extra spicy food.

“What if you don’t like just because you think so?” Sasha asked, stroking a hand down his side, taking a grip of the thickness of his waist, watching the small twitch of Nicke’s face as he undoubtedly imagined Sasha feeding his body ghost peppers.

“Tell me yours,” Nicke ordered, moving so he could grab one of Sasha’s knees, dragging it up almost too hard, just how Sasha liked it.

“No— ah. No being mean to Andre.”

“Andre loves it when you’re mean to him.”

“No,” Sasha corrected, “just you.”

“Okay, what else?”

Sasha thought about it, hard enough to be distracted and distractable, but Nicke seemed in no rush to touch him while he was waiting for an answer.

It was funny how arousal felt so different in his own skin, crackling like road flares, phosphorescent behind his eyes. Sparks all over.

Nicke’s, he knew now, was a deep burn, a thick, tense, hungry thing almost like nerves.

“Jerk off one time,” Sasha breathed. “Then tell me how it is.”

Nicke bit down on his collarbone instead of answering, but Sasha felt it was agreed.

-

All morning, Andre and Djoos wouldn’t leave him alone.

They thought he was Nicke, but that was the plan. He hadn’t ever noticed how closely they stuck to him.

Sasha smiled at them and said nothing, because they were speaking Swedish and expecting him to contribute.

What would Nicke do?

“You been working on your crossovers?” He aimed it at both of them as they were warming up, hoping one would start talking.

“English today?” Djoos asked, eyes narrowed. “Why are you skating like that?”

“Like what?” Sasha asked innocently, knowing both he and Nicke were a little off balance.

“Like you are injured,” Andre said, concern all over his face.

Sasha was saved from replying when Kuzy started skating away backwards, gesturing for what he thought was Sasha to follow.

“Him too.” Andre watched it happen with his lip between his teeth, robbed of his usual smile. “Are you two...okay?”

Sasha made a show of not moving his face. Nicke’s face. Whatever. “Hm?”

“Only—“ Djoos began, “he—“

Infuriatingly, he switched back to Swedish.

“English today,” Sasha parroted, hoping he’d at least slightly managed to approximate Nicke’s accent.

“He seems sad,” Andre supplied. Perhaps the backing away was unconscious, but to his credit he carried on over Sasha’s internal litany of questions. Who was Andre to say Sasha seemed sad? What did they think Sasha was trying to do, showing his faith in them out on his sleeve all the time? Was that sad? Was that the word for it?

“Sorry we lost,” Andre finished, skating away for real this time, because Sasha had let Nicke’s mouth fall open of its own accord, and the shock must have scared him off. “We all miss Mackan too, you know.”

Across the ice, Nicke was telling Kuzy and Dima that he couldn’t speak Russian with a completely straight face and watching them both splutter.

It seemed a lot less funny than it would have been twenty minutes ago.

-

“Backy.”

It took Sasha too long to remember that was him today, coming off the ice after practice. Nicke skated up behind him and bumped him in the shoulder, too hard, angling his chin at Barry.

Barry was waiting for him at the gate, skates still on and steaming gently from the top of his round, bald head. “Got a minute?”

“Sure.” Sasha fell into a rhythm next to him, taking a slow lap. “Everything okay?”

“Your throat alright?”

“Little sore,” Sasha lied, hoping that was enough of an excuse.

“Keep an eye on it.” Barry skated along in silence for another two strides before he got to the point. “Are you with us?”

Technically, no. Sasha clamped down on the urge to giggle horribly. “With us?”

Sasha knew perfectly well what he was being asked, but the shock of it still went right to his chest, hooked under the sternum. He just didn’t have the words he could put in Nicke’s mouth for this.

Barry put a hand on his arm. “I’m not gonna try and coach you like a kid, okay? But are you here? With us? or are you still back in last year? We’re all really sorry about Marcus, but—”

“Business,” Sasha agreed, through gritted teeth.

Sasha wanted to scream.

Sasha wanted to ask why Nicke had never told him about this, the sensation of everything getting stuck in him, even though it was patently inexplicable. “Yeah, I’m here.”

Sasha spoke for him, knowing that if it wasn’t true now it would be tomorrow.

“You can always come talk to me if you need to,” Barry said, though he seemed well aware Nicke probably wouldn’t unless it had to do with hockey.

Nicke was a professional. Sasha was wearing his face, the very least he could do was keep it still.

-

 Sasha got home after Nicke, finding him already in the shower.

“What you’re doing in there?” Sasha asked, trying to be heard over the water.

“Jerking off!” Nicke yelled back.

Sasha leaned in the doorway for a second with closed eyes, listening to it.

The phrase tumbled around in his head, a loosed stone down a steep path, ricocheting off everything it hit. _He seems sad._

Nicke stepped out of the shower, not seeming particularly shocked to see Sasha in the open doorway. It was a huge bathroom, white tiled and with a separate tub, set along the long wall under the high windows. There was plenty of room for them both.

Nicke reached for a towel, but Sasha moved in, suddenly wanting to look at his own face from the outside with a specific question in mind. He took his face between Nicke’s palms, thumbs sweeping the wide spread of his cheekbones, fingers sinking into his short beard.

Nicke, piloting for now but not the one this face belonged to, looked back at him. “The beard is itchy,” he rasped, voice thick from the heat. “You don’t care?”

“Don’t notice,” Sasha murmured, pressing at the lines beside his eyes. “Am I sad?”

Nicke blinked at him. Sasha’s own eyes blinked at him. Sasha suddenly wanted to look everywhere, uncover the sadness from beneath his skin. Maybe it was in the body, the years of accumulated pain and joy and everything else. Maybe it really did make a heart heavy.

Nicke grabbed his wrist, a light grip, so very careful. “Who said you were sad?”

“Andre.”

Nicke pressed his forehead into Sasha’s, meeting at the wrong angle, at odds with the one Sasha had a memory of, doing this with Nicke for the first time. “Kuzy said I seemed disappointed already,” Nicke said, breathing deep and slow. “You think it’s true?”

“Maybe bodies remember last year better than us.”

“I’m not disappointed.”

“I not too sad about hockey. New season. New guys. Me and you.”

Nicke laughed silently. Sasha hadn’t known his body could do that. He’d thought the sound just wanted to come out. “Like every season.”

“Not like every season,” Sasha corrected. “This year we have bigger problems.”

“I wasn’t really jerking off,” Nicke confessed. “Just washing. You have so much _hair._ ”

Sasha joined in when Nicke started to laugh this time, finding that the noise did just want to exit his body. No matter which body it was. “You give it back?”

Nicke kissed him, press of his lips warm and wide against Nicke’s small mouth, soft enough to linger.

-

Not many people could say they’d had their own cock in their mouth. That seemed like bragging rights, until Sasha thought _now I can say I already have when people tell me to go fuck myself_ with the very tip inside his lips, ball of the piercing warm and heavy on his tongue, and couldn’t stop thinking it, pulling off to tell Nicke right away.

Nick threw an arm over his eyes and cackled.

Turned out Sasha’s body could do that too, given enough incentive.

-

In the morning Sasha had his body back and Nicke was still in bed, flopped down on his front with his face mashed into the almost-flat pillow he liked best, drooling a little.

Sasha didn’t move in case he woke him up, but the urge to move his hair out of his face was powerful, knowing how it tickled.

 _Get To Know Your Partner Better!_ flicked across his mind. Stuck lyrics. Seemed to be happening a lot lately. If he hadn’t already known he had a fixative quality, a mind that wanted badly to keep things close once learned, he would have worried all the body switching ad rattled something loose.

Did he know Nicke any better?

He knew better the places where he hurt now, the intensely peculiar sensations his mouth provided to the most ordinary of foods, the headache he always woke up with.

He knew the quiet, solid power of his body, the way everything was sensitive, knew that he had remarkable eyesight and a truly wonky sense of smell.

He knew how Nicke must feel when Sasha dragged light fingers over his bare back, a sensation Sasha had never given much thought to in his own body, but in Nicke’s, so rarely bare, it was always a thrill. Sasha should do it more.

All of these were things he could have noticed, or that Nicke could have told him.

Sasha was the one who preferred to be handled a little less than gently, seeking a bigger sensation, something to match the wild, barely contained want he’d always had when it came to Nicke, which had become love too quickly to disentangle them. Nicke had never asked him for more gentleness than he gave already. Maybe he didn’t need it. Maybe that sensation made him feel different than Sasha, who, after all, still didn’t know his mind.

“We gonna get some wins for you,” Sasha muttered. “For me, too. But we don’t win without you, remember that.”

Sasha had never given himself credit for prophecies, so when Nicke woke up and grumbled blearily at him that he’d let him sleep too long and they were going to be late for the plane, Sasha didn’t mention it again.

-

The season carried on, as seasons always did.

Eighty-two games and change was a lot. People seemed to forget that, even some of the players, until everyone started piling up little injuries. Niggles, someone had told him once. Sasha had always thought that word was funny. _Niggles._ a hairline fracture here, an overstretched tendon there, enough to notice, not enough to stop playing. Something to keep you up at night, niggling.

Sasha didn’t have any, until Barry put Kuzy in for Nicke and gave him Tom up top as a wildcard.

“Gotta give a marriage some room to breathe,” he joked.

They weren’t married, and Sasha didn’t particularly want to “breathe.” But. They started winning.

They kept doing it.

Sasha could see how happy Nicke was, under all his armour.

When he was younger, Nicke’s face had been the one he looked to when he’d score, right after looking at the sky. A smile out of him had been worth every shot, little sharp teeth and big sharp eyes, watching him.

It always felt a little strange when it was someone else sending him passes, but Kuzy howled in his face like a banshee and took Sasha into his joy right along with him, so maybe a little bit of different air was a good thing.

Sasha thought maybe happiness was the remedy for their little problem.

Nicke joked around with the younger guys again. Nicke smiled at a couple reporters. Nicke wrestled Andre when they shared a hotel room on the road.

Nicke crowded Sasha up against the kitchen counter when they made the playoffs, clean-shaven for the last time in at least a few weeks, and Sasha laughed back into his mouth, sharing his joy, made brighter by it.

“Think I know you best now?” Sasha asked him. “Make playoffs with bunch of kids, keep winning?”

“You always knew me best,” Nicke muttered, pupils huge and dark, so wide there was only a thin strip of green to show he had an iris at all.

-

Sasha woke up on the kitchen floor in Nicke’s body, so hungry he felt as though his stomach might chew through his abdomen and make its way to the fridge on its own steam.

Nicke followed a second later, collapsed half on top of Sasha, pawing clumsily at the beard covering his cheeks. “Fuck!”

The yelling felt unnecessary, given Sasha was very close and knew his body could be very loud, but he couldn’t help agreeing with the sentiment.

-

“Okay,” Nicke said, pacing the kitchen in Sasha’s body, dawn only just breaking through the windows. It had been a whole winter and now it was spring, but it still didn’t quite feel like it until the sun came up. “Okay, we need to— how does this stop?”

“I thought it stops when we’re happy.”

“Weren’t we happy?” Nicke stopped pacing, looking down at Sasha, who was sitting at the kitchen table medicating Nicke’s eternal morning headache with caffeine. “You thought I wasn’t happy?”

“Nicke,” Sasha started, not sure how to carry on. “You think you were?”

“I’m happy now,” Nicke said, too quiet. “Does everybody have to be happy all the time?”

“That— not what I meant.”

“I can’t have this conversation while you’re— you’re wearing my body.” He grabbed a handful of his hair, tugging at it, the grey peeking out between his fingers. “I had no idea this felt so good to you. Fuck.”

“You want I do it for you?” Sasha offered, not sure how it would feel.

Nicke looked at him with a lost expression buried in the tension of his jaw, the restless flick of his eyelids. He moved slowly when he wasn’t in his own body, not very slowly, but slower than he could have. Sasha knew his own reflexes. They weren’t NIcke’s though. Nobody’s were.

Nicke folded carefully down on the kitchen floor, floorboards creaking faintly, loud in the silence as Nicke sat there, not moving at all. Finally, he seemed to decide he was going to fold forward, landing with his arms and head in Sasha’s lap.

Sasha stroked his hair, still not used to the texture of it through Nicke’s fingers. He took a better grip when Nicke closed his eyes, pulling just hard enough to feel resistance.

“Why does this feel so good?” Nicke mumbled into his arms. “I had no idea.”

“I could tell you, if you ask.”

“Did we stop talking?”

“Don’t think so,” Sasha said, trying to put aside the urge he had to ask to switch places. “Maybe we don’t do it right.”

He could feel Nicke sigh all the way through his body, the great bellows of Sasha’s lungs collapsing with the outrush of air. “Do you want to fuck?” Nicke asked, too quietly.

“I promise no spicy food if you want to sleep more,” Sasha offered, cupping the back of his head, pressing his fingers in where he knew Nicke’s headaches lived, even though Sasha didn’t get them. He fought now that maybe there was something psychosomatic about the things they’d carried with them, body to body, places where the mind remembered tension, bringing it along for the ride.

“You don’t mind?”

“Your body, my body, we switch again soon. We maybe like this forever, I think I learn to take care.”

-

 Sasha had rarely noticed the lack of curiosity Nicke seemed to have towards the physical detail of his own body, the inaccessible crevices and the smooth, wonderful curves.

Sasha noticed it then, that his interest was a question, a hand placed just so with “does that feel good?” and the soft tilt of his eyebrows which was all Nicke, no matter which face he was wearing. “Like that?”

“You don’t know what make your body feel good?” Sasha asked, turning over so he was on his back, Nicke arranged over him again, the heaviness of Sasha’s belly pressing against the nearly-hairless curve of Nicke’s. The rasp of it was still so unexpected, Nicke’s skin so overloaded with nerves.

“I’m not in there,” Nicke said. “I’m in here.” He tapped his temple, Sasha’s temple. “I only know what feels good wherever I am.”

“You want me to say more?”

Nicke thought about it, eyes flicking back and forth, mapping his own face with Sasha beneath it. Sasha had never seen concentration like it. “Yes,” Nicke decided. “Tell me.”

Sasha did.

-

Waking up in his own body felt stranger than it should have.

-

Playoffs started the way they always did: a surreal sprint into the first series, riding high off a good season.

This year though— this year Sasha felt different.

Twice as satisfied to have made it, given their knocks in the summer, and twice as determined.

He and Nicke weren’t on a line together. That was fine. He and Nicke were too shattered with exhaustion to do more then fall asleep on each other most nights, now. That was also fine.

Nicke was playing with a little joy again. That was more than fine.

The closer of their first series, Nicke bumped him in the tunnel before they went out under the lights, staying close, breath warm over the sweat already beginning to pool at the edge of Sasha’s pads. “How many more?”

“Just one, tonight,” Sasha said, reaching back to touch his chin with the back of his glove, knowing exactly which space in the world Nicke occupied. “Ready?”

“One more,” Nicke repeated, pushing himself away.

They got one more.

-

The second round felt like the second round: a collective holding of breath, Zhenya Malkin up all of them like a wasp, everyone who understood him, anyway.

Sasha didn’t envy Kuzy, who got the worst of his temper, though in hindsight it was always a little bit funny.

“How many?” Nicke asked him in the tunnel, every time.

Seven. Six. Five—

-

It had never occurred to him that the worst injury of the playoffs could be Nicke’s.

-

The year Nicke was out with a concussion, Sasha didn’t make any wishes. He’d known just as well as anyone what would let a concussion heal, and it was simple rest. Nothing artful or magical to it. Don’t watch TV. Fight your addiction to online crosswords. Listen to your weird music and sleep.

Sasha knew he’d be back.

-

Nicke was still in the trainer’s room after the game, hand wrapped up to the wrist, back in his suit to travel.

His eyes were closed, but Sasha thought maybe those lines around his eyes mean he was awake, tension creasing into the smooth skin of his face.

Sasha sat down next to him, screech of one of those little rolling stools with shitty wheels enough to make him wince. Nicke opened one eye enough to glance at him. “If it’s you in here you’re on the good drugs,” he mumbled, slightly off his English.

“Broken?”

“Very.”

Nicke was holding it. Close to his chest, cradled in. “How many?” Sasha asked.

“Four.”

“Four. You coming back.”

Nicke closed his eyes again, abruptly swinging his legs over the side of the table and sitting up, moving so Sasha was between them, still in his under armour, still damp from the ice. “Yeah. But first we go home.”

-

Nicke was asleep from the minute his head hit the pillow.

Even unconscious, Sasha could feel him in the night, moving uncomfortably, body trying to find the best angle for a broken bone.

-

Nicke got dressed as usual. Sasha didn’t offer to help, already trying to think of how to phrase it, considering his words in a way English didn’t force him to as often as it had before, but still sometimes required.

“You want to play tonight?” Sasha asked, bluntly, unable to find a more elegant way.

Nicke stopped pulling on a sock left-handed, hair a wild morning mess. He always did it last. “Of course I _want_ to.”

“You can.”

Nicke blinked at him, corner of his mouth tucking in a little tighter.

Sasha wondered where the feeling was in him for being left waiting; he felt it as a slow-creeping coal fire, skin warming slowly as he tried not to press Nicke for an answer.

“How many?” Nicke asked him.

“Four.”

“Make it three.”

Sasha had said to a reporter, in a moment of daring honesty, that Nicke was their leader. That they loved him. All of that he’d meant entirely. “I ask again after?”

“Let’s see.”

-

Sasha asked again.

Three. Two—

-

Nicke was still in the locker room in a suit. No pads, no helmet. Just a soft green hat and his eternally strange beard, thicker than it was when they first were here, down at the bottom of the second round, but not any more explicable.

Sasha found him in the hall when everyone else was still getting ready, towering over him in his skates as he laid a hand on his cheek, glove discarded on the floor.

“You won’t let me feel it?” He already knew the answer.

“No.”

“Why?”

“How many?”

“One.”

Nicke mirrored the gesture, left hand cool against Sasha’s cheek even through his beard. “So we find out who the curse is, yeah?”

Sasha had enough objections to fill a stadium, but not nearly enough time to voice them. “If we win is because everyone too scared to let you down,” he said instead, bursting with something that should have been nerves. In Nicke’s body it would have been nerves. In Sasha’s it was fullness, retention of something too big to name before it settled. “When we met I make a wish,” he said. “Play with you for a long time.”

“Not forever? I’m offended.”

“No such thing.” Sasha stooped to pick up his glove. “You watch when we win?”

“You’re so sure?”

“No,” Sasha said, fully armoured again. “One more, just seems like we can do it.”

-

Nicke’s was the first face he saw when they made it to the third round.

The first person he went to, because it belonged to him as much as Sasha.

“How many now?” Nicke asked him, nose buried in his pads.

“Fourteen.”

“Less,” Nicke said, letting him go so someone else could have his attention.

-

Every year playoffs had been the same; optimism after a great season, slammed up against the wall of the second round.

Sasha almost didn’t know what to do when they got home, too overjoyed to speak. It hardly felt real to be over the threshold.

Only one thing was different.

Nicke kissed him so hard against the back of the door that Sasha almost slid to the floor right there, craving the cool of the marble flagstones against his overheated skin, but then he would be out of reach of Nicke’s mouth, his smile, the way he couldn’t seem to stop laughing when they broke apart for breath. “We cursed still, you think?” Sasha asked, wanting desperately to get out of his suit, naked beneath it, hard against the back of the zipper.

“I wasn’t on the ice.” Nicke was still pressed against him, leaning into his chest. They had too many goddamn layers on.

“Were there,” Sasha mumbled into his cheek. “You coming back. We win it, you’ll see.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Nicke kissed him again, the pulled back, straightening the front of Sasha’s suit, tugging at the waist with a wry twist to his lips. Why had Sasha never spent time in front of the mirror making faces when he had Nicke’s face to discover?

Maybe he’d known it too well already, and it hadn’t occurred to him to stretch it in ways Nicke didn’t on purpose. It would have felt too much like puppeteering. Nicke stopped, fingers just inside the band of Sasha’s suit trousers. “Let me feel?” Sasha asked again, not sure what he wanted the answer to be.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“We’ll get tired.”

“We already tired.”

Nicke frowned. “Sasha, leave it. We-- can solve it later. Look.” He held up his right hand, still in its gauze, two fingers taped together, the index ad the middle, swelling still so wide Sasha ached for him. He’d play as soon as they’d bend and as much as Sasha wanted to dissuade him, he’d do the same. “You really want to feel this?”

Sasha wished they’d gotten farther than the door so they could have this conversation somewhere better. The slight echo was eerie now, when it wasn’t adding a harmonic to the way Sasha had gasped out a laugh just before Nicke kissed him. Sasha took his hand between both of his, feeling the heat thrown out from the injury, exothermic in its intensity. “Of course. It’s you. Of course I want.”

“You say it like it’s easy.”

“It is.” Nothing could be simpler. “You don’t believe?”

Nicke just looked at him.

The clockwork feeling was back, a stuck gear grinding at _almost._

Nicke was still looking at him, silent and pale, warm in his hand. Sasha, a few months ago, would have let him be. He’d always known how to do that, when Nicke could sulk like he was competing for Sweden. Sasha half expected to hear a singer wailing about something, incomprehensibly, or at the very least ABBA. it would have broken the silence, given them both something to listen to instead of Sasha’s indecision.

“Please say why,” Sasha asked, wanting to feel what was below the gauze they’d packed between them somehow.

Nicke swallowed hard enough that Sasha could see it, the tension in his jaw spilling down his throat. “It’s my pain. My hand. I want it to stay mine.”

“You don’t want me to know?”

“I want you--” Nicke took his hand back, using the other to scrape Sasha’s hair back off his forehead, grabbing it and holding on, pulling Sasha’s forgotten arousal up from where he’d left it smouldering on the floor. “You feel it all… so much, all the time. Everywhere. I don’t know how you don’t burn up. Don’t add my hand to that. I want to win. Then I want to feel it myself. Don’t lend it to me. It doesn’t matter if it hurts. It’s-- the right kind.” He took a breath, shaky and slow. “I could tell you about it.”

What had Sasha wanted, at the beginning of this year? A fresh start? An insight into what was slowly coming between them? What had he gotten instead? The deep and uncomfortable knowledge of Nicke's body and all its little aches and foibles and still so little of his mind. it was utterly impossible to know anyone from the inside. Everyone had a world inside them that overlapped with everyone else's, but kept its borders. Sasha hadn't known how much Nicke blamed himself for all their many failures until they really were under some inescapable spell, but it had so little to do with their bodies. "I want that," Sasha told him. "Don't need to feel it."

"I want to win."

"Me too."

"I want to win with you," Nicke clarified. "It won't be-- right. It won't be the same if I can't. I don't want to let you down."

Sasha could see the effort of it, the way his good hand was working for purchase, keeping them both exactly as they were, pressing into each other's space. Reaching across the boundary. It took him too long to work the words out, but they had time. They had oceans of it, seconds between breaths. "You never let me down. Nicke. Not that."

Nicke swallowed, sound of it stark and close and wet. "I want both of us on the ice. Not me in your body. Not you in mine. Both of us. for real. No half-ways."

"Deal," Sasha said, when he could speak again, though he had no idea how he'd keep that promise. He'd figure it out. They'd figure it out. There was something strange and dissonant now, watching Nicke and knowing what he must look like to him, all the greyed and bruised places. There was always something dissonant about being known and loved anyway, in spite of more than a decade of intimacy. Sasha thought there was a kind of magic in all of that, too, mistakes and silences and ignorance of pain, and love anyway. “Eleven years lucky?”   

“How many more?” Nicke asked back, before he kissed him once, and let him go.

-

There were times in life, Sasha thought, that only became significant in hindsight.

He’d thought at the beginning of the year that maybe there was something widening between them, failure pushing them apart. Sasha had wanted to know him better, what made him tick.

Gaining and losing his body and Nicke’s dozens of times over the season hadn’t offered him that. Going to Nicke first of anyone after breaking their stupid, imaginary curse and feeling Nicke bury his face in his chest despite their audience had.

Home was that feeling, all through his body.

Home was Nicke telling him how the relief felt.

-

They won it in Vegas.

-

If someone had told Sasha later that he’d switched places with Nicke on the ice in that instant, when Nicke crashed into him, cheek-to-cheek, soaked through with sweat and relief, Sasha would have believed them.

Well. If Nicke had told him.

Sasha didn’t even have to look at him, clinging on so hard he thought he might tear through his jersey. “It’s you, baby. After me I give it to you.”

“Okay. Okay, yeah, let’s do it.”

Every muscle in Sasha’s body ached, but it was absolutely nothing compared to the explosion of that seemed to come out of Nicke when they lifted it.

Maybe not everything got stuck in his chest.

-

Finding a minute to themselves as Stanley Cup Champions in Las Vegas turned out to be nearly impossible, so it wasn’t until they’d begged off to put on some clothes which were less beer and sweat soaked that Sasha found a moment to grab Nicke in the tightest hug he could manage with no pads between them and yell right in his face.

Nicke yelled right back, and then, somehow, they were picking up where they left off weeks ago, Nicke taking him by the hair and kissing him silent.

Sasha hadn’t been waiting. That was the luxury of those who had enough energy to devote to arousal, but as soon as Nicke nipped at his bottom lip everything deferred became urgent.

“What if we switch?” he asked, dragging him onto the bed with him when he started to fall.

“Who gives a fuck?” Nicke said, laughing breathlessly. “What do we have to lose?”

Sasha thought happiness probably felt much the same to Nicke as it did to him: lightness, as though he’d become untethered from something, a great, floating expansion as though he went on forever inside.

“You right too often,” Sasha said. “Good thing you’re wrong about curses.”

“Or we broke it,” Nicke said, edge taken off his voice.

Sasha wanted him. It was one thing to have wanted while in Nicke’s body, to have gotten to know _what_ he felt, the way desire made itself known to him, the way he started to tremble faintly, so still the pulse in his veins was visible under his skin. It was another to kiss him with his own lips and have Nicke’s lips go soft, feel his mouth open on a breath and his fingers digging into the top of his shoulders.

He wanted Nicke on top of him, every ounce of his weight.

It felt like an eternity to wait before Nicke started plucking at his shirt, grabbing at the fabric until Sasha stripped it off.

“The rest,” Nicke ordered, sitting back on his elbows to watch, and -- everywhere Nicke touched him already felt too hot. He felt it in his spine, ripples of heat. He needed Nicke to touch him, to remind them both what it felt like to fuck uninhibited, like it really didn’t matter in the slightest whether they had to get wasted with everyone else in an hour and might not have time to switch back, like Nicke could take his body any way he wanted it and keep it too, for a while. He wanted Nicke inside him, his cock already damp against his stomach at the thought.

Sasha shed his clothes in record time, working at Nicke’s when he told him to, Nicke biting at the side of his neck, his patchy beard a new rasp against his skin.

Sasha had probably been more desperate than this, but never more jubilant.

Nicke knew his body as well as Sasha knew his, but he still bit out a shaky curse when Sasha took him as deep into his mouth as he could manage, revelling in the feeling of it, hot and salty-sour at the back of his throat.

He still collapsed against Sasha’s back, later, when they’d found some lube and Nicke had watched Sasha work himself open, too fast and not enough, and then settled all the way down, front of his thighs shaking against the back of Sasha’s legs. “Fuck,” Nicke rasped, wrapping an arm around his chest, nails digging perfectly into his skin. “Fuck, it’s you.”

Sasha didn’t come right then and there, but if he were younger he might have.

-

Sasha was braced for the blackout, so it was something of a shock when it didn’t happen.

He just slowly worked his way back from the drifting doze he’d entered from sheer exhaustion to find himself half on Nicke’s stomach, Nicke tracing a shape into his shoulder he realised after a moment was the Stanley Cup.

“No switch?” Sasha’s mouth felt desiccated. Somewhere in the hotel there would be drinks. A wild abundance.

Nicke said nothing for a while, still tracing the top of the bowl around a few of Sasha’s faint freckles. “You sound disappointed.”

Sasha pinched him. Nicke didn’t even flinch. Sasha knew he wouldn’t. “Maybe,” Sasha countered, watching Nicke’s suspiciously straight face, “break one curse, breaks all?”

“I thought you said we weren’t cursed.”

Sasha grabbed Nicke’s hand when he’d moved down to tracing the base, awkward with his left. Nicke laced their fingers together, gripping back. “I was right.”

-

**Author's Note:**

> A cut-time signature is music with a 2-2 tempo. I thought it would be too heinous a pun to call it Double-Time, so I hope everyone who just groaned is pleased.
> 
> This was a pinch hit so I hope it worked for what it is, and shout out to Jolach for pointing out what the Russian for strawberry is.


End file.
